Hillary Clinton becomes more appalling by the moment. In addition to her gas tax pandering, she is calling (via Matthew Yglesias) for the breakup of OPEC:

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN. . .

Still, Clinton is comparatively rational next to Roger Kaplan calling for the U.S. Army to “seize” the oil fields of Saudi Arabia:

WHAT IS TO PREVENT US from seizing the oil fields? The U.S. Army can solemnly announce that it will not take a dime from their exploitation beyond operating costs, and surely there are economists who can figure out how to set up a distribution system that will not wreck the world’s oil markets, with all the ramifications that would bring about. I am in particular thinking of what a provisional neo-colonial administration of the Gulf’s oil resources might do to Africa’s booming oil industries. For what it is worth, the European dependence of Russian oil will be lessened by our seizure of the Middle East’s reserves.

Ignore, for a moment, the numerous problems with Kaplan’s idea–the already over-extended U.S. military’s inability to stabilize Iraq, the fact that we import oil into Iraq to sustain our occupation there, etc. Suppose that the we successfully defanged OPEC somehow, or “seized” Saudi oil fields and then found out that they were pumping at full capacity? Will Americans elect leaders who call for conservation and alternative energy, or madmen who call to invade Nigeria, Russia, Venezuela, Canada . . .